Are you going to wear that? Seriously?

I don't know how many times in the 90s that people asked me when I was due. The 90s, in case you aren't in the know, was a wonderful age of leggings and over-sized shirts. Actually, it's still somewhat of an "timeless classic", but it takes a certain personality to pull it off as well. Although really, who was I fooling with my maternity-wannabe wardrobe? And, coincidentally, I spent quite a bit of the 90s wishing I were pregnant.  But what better way to "disguise" your figure flaws than with clothing, right? Well, actually...

I remember a defining moment when I was having trouble finding leggings. I went into some chain store and was trying no-name clothing on. This one pair of leggings clearly revealed more than they hid. I think I can trace my disenchantment with leggings from there. But while it lasted, how delightful it was to feel like I was hiding in my clothes.

My other survival trick (read: another form of self-deception) was vests. During the acme of that trend, I must've had a dozen vests. The cool thing about them was you can wear a shirt that doesn't quite button all the way down under them, thus salvaging a piece of wardrobe until it fits later on. 

Definition: Saving until it fits (verb). A state of mental inability to accept one's size in relation to a favorite piece of clothing, often one purchased as incentive to  lose weight, such as a bikini or fitted garment.

You know, I still have things I just can't bear to part with, for one reason or another. Every once in a while I try to psyche myself out and I buy something at a spendy store, since buying things at cheap places tends to send the message to me that it's OK to gain weight at will because the cost to upgrade is so inexpensive. Like that salmon colored cross-over top from Ann Taylor. Yes I fit into it. Is that any excuse to wear it? Back when I reached goal, I bought a bunch of size mediums just because I could. The problem: the material shrinks up and in terribly, so the solution is to buy a size bigger so you can wear it longer. Oh the humanity to buy a size large when you don't "have" to!

Come to think of it, a lot of my attempts at dressing in "normal" clothing involves salmon. Hmmm....

Anyway, my motto these days (post reaching goal and gaining most of my weight back) is "just because you can doesn't mean you should. Like buying a size that fits--sort of, mostly. Like buying something that fits as long as you don't move. Like buying something trendy that actually looks bad on every body type, like the baby doll top. You know, when my daughter was a toddler and not picky, she wore a bunch of those (although for kids they call them "swing tops") and she looked great. But she's a child and doesn't have boobs. An adult woman tends to look like she's trying to be something she's not (call me Lolita and I'll call you Humbert...) Worse of all are the baby dolls that cut across the boobs of large-breasted women. Hello!? Way to highlight an area in a not very attractive way.

Actually, I do this, too. My favorite top for the past couple of years is J. Jill's crossover too. It works for me on so many levels. It has 3/4 sleeves, which are great for short-armed people like myself. It isn't fitted, so I can wear it on top of pants with impunity. And it is vaguely feminine. So if at times it cuts me across the boobs, for the most part it says "I'm trying to look like a girl and not a well-wrapped package."

So to all the women who hide in their clothing (either to conceal flab or to conceal scrawniness), I understand. But seriously: it's not working...

The Emperor's New Clothes, or Can You See Me Now?

I've been taken by the phrase "muffin top" lately, and I'm noticing them more as well. What is up with the surge in bumps and bulges? How come so many people are leaking outside the boundaries of their clothing? And the ones who are actually exposing skin, said "muffin tops": do they not look in the mirror before they leave their houses? How can you not notice a bunch of exposed skin creeping out the top of your pants?

I attribute this phenomenon to the Emperor's Syndrome: these folks just don't notice the bulges, or they hope that others don't notice it. Yes, I have clothes that look good only if I stand in a certain way with everything sucked in, but throughout the day I do more tugging than Jean Luc Picard just to maintain the look. I am never comfortable when clothes don't fit. What does it matter if you can squeeze into a smaller size if said size doesn't fit properly or you don't feel comfortable in it? I don't get it.

OK, so I'm lying: I do get it, but I wish I didn't. Wouldn't it be better to wear something that fits you and makes you look fabulous than to wear something with the dubious honor of being a smaller size? I wish I could say that size doesn't matter, but it does.

I'm also guilty of wearing the wrong size, but then again I don't own a full-length mirror and I don't check myself before leaving for work. I'm the type of person who maintains an attitude of not caring about my appearance. Deep down I'm as vain as the next person, but some areas I am less vain than others. I am guilty, too, of wearing an incorrectly sized bra. Nothing looks worse than boobs oozing out of the top of a bra: you can see it even from outside of a top. It's not sexy--well, not to me anyway. Right now I'm in a transitional stage, so I'm using the "in the process of losing weight" as my excuse for poorly fitting foundation garments. I have the opposite problem of oozing boobs: that of shrinking tits. The bra cups are a bit larger than they should be, so when I cross my arms the excess bra makes a funny line against my shirts. Sigh.

One of the things that keeps me going this weight loss experience is the feeling of loose clothing. I've felt tight jeans, I know what they're like. I've zipped my pants lying on the bed and doing some bizarre kind of shimmy to get the zipper all the way up. I've lowered myself to sit on the ground and felt like my thighs were going to pop and my gut burst. I wore jeans so tight once when I was skiing that I needed help to get up every time I fell (OK, that could have been a different problem...) BTDT. I'm enjoying the feeling of cinching my belt tighter to keep my pants up. I'm pleased with the folds of excess fabric radiating from my butt. I can bend over and tie my shoe without bringing up food chunks. (Well, the whole overeating syndrome is a topic for another day.)

An irony of losing weight and having too loose clothing is wearing the same accessories to hide the bag as I did to hide the flab. All my vests, which I have been wearing for half a decade in order to obscure my fat from view, are getting a second life. Woo hoo.

This topic is just so large, no pun intended. I'll have to finish up at a later time.

Perspective

As a human being, I think I've spent more time on the earth thinking about food or eating food or trying to impact the effects of food than any other activities combined. If I had channeled that energy into virtually any other endeavor, I probably could have come up with a solution to global warming by now. Well, at least discovered a new hobby, one that doesn't include anything edible.

At Weight Watchers, which I've been a member of for about 9 years, the talk is about thinking and motivation and planning. What do you want to achieve by losing weight? Is that a realistic goal? Are your intentions strong enough to make your goal come true? My reason right now, well, one of them, is to lose weight for my kids.

Conventional wisdom says that goals that are about transitory events or centered on others rather than doing something for yourself are doomed to failure. I know that. But my reason is more than just "for my kids," it encompasses a lot of other things. Let me explain.

I recently found a bunch of photos on disc from my old computer and imported them into iPhoto. I found tons of pictures of my husband, my daughter, my cats, and even my old house, but not a lot of me. The ones with me in them show me mugging for the camera (if you suspect you will look horrible, why not purposely look horrible??) There are virtually no pictures of me during my pregnancy. Considering that is a time when I was most at peace with my body, that's fairly ironic. But more to the point, the lack of pictures of me and my kids, besides pointing out that I usually take the pictures in my family, makes it harder for me to be included in the family. What will my children's memories of me be when I am represented by a bunch of mugging, goofy faced pictures, or me hiding under or behind something?

My son was adopted from Nepal (hence my handle, Kath'Aama), and one of the requirements of the Nepali government is an annual report, with pictures, on his life here with us. I have tons of pictures of him, tons with his adoring older sister, and many with both kids and their daddy. With me? Not so many. So every year I really work hard to find even one of me with the kids. Sometimes I have to have one taken on the spot for inclusion (talk about "spontaneous picture"...) Pretty much that is the time when all my shenanigans hiding from the camera or making the worst faces I can totally backfires on me. Is that how I want to be remembered by my kids?

The other interesting thing about my recent introspection is noticing how I looked in the past versus what I am certain I was feeling. Pictures that I once thought cringe-worthy were actually quite nice. Pictures I thought representative of a huge me turn out to be not so chubby. And conversely, times when I thought myself so clever at hiding my girth were not as successful as I thought.

So I think that the goal of feeling comfortable and confident enough to be photographed in order to provide a visual history of my life for my kids is a good goal for me. Just confine the pictures to my face and upper torso...

Spontaneity!

Today I decided to start a new blog. I've been thinking about it for a while, after finding some hideous pictures of myself on CD. Why not chronicle my weight loss efforts honestly? What a concept: being honest about weight...